January 2010

Latisys is a VC backed data center solutions company. Latisys was formerly Managed Data Holdings, a company founded in 1994, that was transformed and renamed in 2007 by a group of venture capital firms.

Screening candidates that send in resumes is a tedious task. I get to do that when my clients are hiring new salespeople. It's a time-consuming task. Really, resumes don't mean anything because how many aren't embellished?

Anyway, at the 1st Startup Telephony Camp which Larry Lisser ran, we had a chance to hear from 4 start-ups - SayHired, Close Haul Communications, Fonolo, and Pebb.ly.

So I know of a few companies looking for marketing, sales and channel people.

During my interview with PAETEC's COO, E.J. Butler, at ITEXPO East last week, some of what we talked about was the Profitability Proforma. The Profitability Proforma is a toolkit for the PAETEC sales force to use to provide a price quote to the prospective customer while still being a profitable circuit sale for the carrier.

New Edge Networks, an EarthLink company, cut their wholesale division this month. While volumes were good, especially with wholesale clients like Verizon, the margins were too thin for the NEN corporate strategy. That strategy would be to milk as much money as possible while this company remains afloat.

The new strategy is to double down on retail. Hire more channel managers and more direct sales people, so they can compete with each other on DSL sales.

I see many folks asking if SAAS (software-as-a-service) will be hurt by data center outages. So I figured I would take a shot at it.

Anything over the IP network is going to be slightly less reliable than the TDM network. The TDM network had 100 years to create the 5 nines reliability that customers have come to expect. IP networks have not had that long - 15 years max to design some kind of reliability.

One big difference is that IP networks have more points of failure. Routers and switches on each end.

It was July of 2009 when the applications for BTOP and BIB awards were due. It's January 2010 and shovel ready awards have been granted mainly for middle mile projects. Where are the rest of the awards?

Last night I got to listen to Gary Vaynerchuk speaking about Crush It (Amazon affilaite link), his new book. He talked about branding your business via online marketing, which is what has made him famous (via video blogging about wine on Wine Library TV). [You can see a 15 minute talk of his on YouTube].

His primary thought is that Content is King. So if you run a company and your company isn't blogging, shame on you.

Tom Keating has a blog post about Google's VoIP Plans. (Cue the Dr. Evil laugh). What Google is trying to do, according to Google VP of Product Management, Bradly Horowitz's hints at their future roadmap when he said, "What we're trying to do with telephony is give people a seamless experience that frees up their telephony communication from the silos where it's lived for the last decade. Voicemail, my contacts, all of those things have been segregated from the rest of my Web experience.